Is there a way to search for a start time before "now"?

Given the fact that "hide future tasks" doesn't hide things starting today but with a start time later than now, I'd like to add this to the saved search I use for viewing my day-to-day tasklist (i.e. I want to create a search field that excludes tasks which don't start til later today). When searching for a due date, you can put "today" in the search field and it will only find tasks relative to whatever "today" happens to be at that moment (rather than only searching relative to a fixed date. Every time I use this search it remains current and I don't have to keep telling it what "today" is). With the time field, I only seem to be able to enter an actual time, so this isn't much use for creating a search that always stays current without me having to edit it each time.

Is there any kind of workaround for this that anyone is aware of, or am I just stuck with tasks I can't do yet showing up in my list? I submitted a support ticket a while ago asking for them to make "hide future tasks" hide tasks where the start time hasn't arrived yet, but until that gets fixed I'd really like a workaround if there is one!